Beyond Belief (27 page)

Grace, Bill’s wife—probably one of the most conservative in the group—shook her head in disagreement. “No. I believe our prophet when she said that there are many people who will be as if they never were. They will go to neither heaven nor hell because they never had the chance to know the Truth,” she said with finality.

I glanced around the group. Heads nodded in concurrence.

Bill took it from there. “Well, that’s why we have to spread the Gospel. It’s our church’s responsibility to bring as many as possible into the fold. Everyone should have a chance to make a decision. Who will they choose? God or the devil? As a church we need to give more money and send more missionaries into foreign lands. The world needs to know the Truth.”

This question of who would get into heaven had been secretly tearing at me ever since I’d returned from my own missionary work five years earlier. And my dinner companions’ answers were the same old litany of arguments that had never felt satisfactory. I felt a flutter in my chest as anxiety (or was it anger?) clawed at me. How could we think our church of a few million people could proselytize to the billions of people in the world? I believed in spreading God’s word, but I also knew it was impossible to reach everyone. And why would God want to annihilate most of the world simply because they hadn’t heard the Gospel? More importantly, if He did, was this a God I wanted to believe in and follow so fastidiously?

I could feel the anger build, like a slow heat, starting in my
heart and moving up to my throat until I could taste words forming in my mouth. Too suddenly, I blurted out, “I just can
not
imagine a God who wouldn’t admit to heaven a Laotian, a Tibetan, an African who’d never even heard the word
Christian
. How can an all-loving, just God deny eternal life to someone just because he was unlucky enough to be born in a pagan country? I can’t see God that way . . . it’s just . . . too mean.”

I looked around the table. Lee’s mouth gaped open. Bill was shaking his head, obviously formulating a theological response, while Barb wiped her mouth and hid behind her napkin. Even the children’s table went quiet.

At first their response to my outburst made me even angrier. Then I was just embarrassed by my own admission of doubt. A long heavy moment of stunned silence hung in the air.

“Well, who’s up for dessert?” I said finally, pushing my chair back to retrieve my apple crumble from the oven.

Fundamental Doctrine #18: The Gift of Prophecy

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is prophecy. This gift is an identifying mark of the remnant church and was manifested in the ministry of Ellen G. White. As the Lord’s messenger, her writings are a continuing and authoritative source of truth that provide for the church comfort, guidance, instruction, and correction.

F
OR MONTHS THE DISCOMFORT
I’d felt during that Sabbath dinner conversation kept cropping up in my consciousness. Our brief debate had freed up the dissonance within me, and I now grappled with a cascade of doubts on a daily basis. I prayed and studied for clarity, but my uneasiness remained.

Several months later one of my teaching colleagues walked into my office and closed the door. Howard came across as a conservative, play-by-the-rules type of guy, but under his buttoned-up exterior he was a free spirit who was always questioning. I had feared he had stopped going to church altogether lately, but I couldn’t ask. I didn’t want to know if he had actually fallen that far.

It’s funny I was concerned about his churchgoing during my own crisis of faith, but I still couldn’t picture myself abandoning the Sabbath by not attending church. Questioning and criticizing the church I could handle; leaving the community was a Mount Everest. I didn’t want him to expose me to the same slippery slope I suspected he was sliding down.

Howard sat down and leaned forward, holding up a book, and even though we were alone whispered, “Nikki, you must read this. You’re not going to believe it, but Ellen G. White was a fraud!”

I jerked away from him, irritated, my mind screaming at me to get him out of my office. I was already feeling exhausted and guilty for questioning the Truth. I had gone through college courses evaluating my prophet’s spiritual gifts; my professors—smart people, all—had accepted her prophetic abilities and piety, though some less vigorously than others. Belief in Ellen White and her writings were central to my life. Without her, other church doctrines would be thrown into disarray. Could I even entertain the possibility that she was a fraud? Could I spend the time and energy it would take to evaluate such a heresy? I took a deep breath.

“Oh come on. It’s probably just a disgruntled member who wants to blame the church for everything,” I sighed, signaling my desire to get back to work.

“No,” Howard shook his head vigorously. “In fact this author has been an SDA minister for many years. He’s done extensive
research with a ton of examples showing where Ellen White copied complete passages from other authors and claimed them to be hers. Read it for yourself and then tell me what you think.”

He placed the book on my desk, turned, and left.

I looked down at the title,
The White Lie
. Was this some sort of joke, calling our prophet a liar? I hurriedly threw the book into my bottom desk drawer. I didn’t want to read it, let alone risk anyone seeing it on my desk.

For the rest of the day the book’s title kept intruding into my thoughts . . .
white lie, white lie
. By five o’clock I opened my drawer and stared at it, turned it over, and read the fly leaf. Finally I reasoned I at least needed to know this pastor’s claims so that I could rebut his arguments.

That night, after the kids were in bed and Lee had left for a church deacons’ meeting, I slipped the book out of my handbag.

Settling in on my side of the bed where I normally sat for evening devotions, I took a deep breath and opened the book. I realized that the author, Walter Rea, was the same minister my brother (also a minister) had recently praised for his ministerial gifts. I leafed through the chapters and saw that it was heavily annotated. Extensive footnotes gave proof of copious references and corroborating material. As an academic, I knew this meant I could verify (or refute) whatever this book might say. It certainly looked as if Elder Rea had done his due diligence.

I quickly read through the introduction to get the gist of the book. Then I stopped and stared at my quiet bedroom.

What the author was proposing was absolutely earthshaking to any Adventist who fully believed in Ellen White as a prophet—especially to someone like me who had been protected from outsiders’ views of my church for my entire adult life. Elder Rea was
suggesting—no, absolutely stating—that Mrs. White was a complete fraud and that the church, down through the years, had not only hidden this fact but had embellished her “gifts” to make her words seem to have come directly from God. I was breathless. Could this possibly be true? I wouldn’t even entertain these ideas if they came from a nonmember—but Pastor Rea was one of us.

“The
true believers,
” the text read, “will be the unwary, the fearful, the guilt-ridden, the overzealous, the well-intentioned, the unquestioning. Lacking personal confidence in God, they seek him through their chosen saint, who they think has an unfailing pipeline to the heavenly places.”

Was I an unwary “true believer” taking Ellen White’s words as gospel because the church exalted her as a messenger from God? Was it possible I’d been naive in accepting what I had been told for decades?

My heart beat faster. As my eyes raced through this incendiary publication, Mr. Rea laid out his treatise fact by methodical fact about the beginnings and growth of this church . . . my church. He recounted how Ellen White had suffered from a traumatic brain injury before she began hearing God’s voice and prophesying to her followers. He explained how she and the other church pioneers had come up with the Sanctuary Doctrine after Jesus had failed to return in 1844 as many had believed He would.

Sadness and confusion settled over me. If even part of what I was reading was true, I knew I’d have to respond to this new information somehow. Although I’d felt the need to hide my own slowly growing crisis of faith, I do not advocate intellectual dishonesty.

I badly wanted to ignore the possibility that my whole inner schema was about to crumble, but I knew I couldn’t. I got out of bed and snuck down the hall to our family room. Kneeling in front of
my bookshelf, I pulled out several Ellen White books to check Elder Rea’s references, hoping he’d misquoted or misunderstood. But I quickly ascertained that, at the very least, Walter Rea had gotten his E.G.W. quotes right. Cross-legged on my cold, drafty floor, I stared into space again, barely breathing. My head reeled with the possibility that my church—that I—had been taken in by a brain-injured woman with a penchant for plagiarism.

But this book of accusation I’d spent my evening with was saying even more than that. It was claiming that the church itself was complicit in this fraud and had, in fact, been both enhancing and perpetuating her claim of prophetic abilities.

I unfolded my aching legs, shoved the books back onto the shelf, and slammed shut
The White Lie
firmly and decidedly. Before I tossed out the foundation of my entire life, I needed more information.

Fundamental Doctrine #22: Christian Behavior

We are called to be a godly people who think, feel, and act in harmony with the principles of heaven. This means that our amusement and entertainment should meet the highest standards of Christian taste and beauty. While recognizing cultural differences, our dress is to be simple, modest, and neat, befitting those whose true beauty does not consist of outward adornment but in the imperishable ornament of a gentle and quiet spirit.

I
T TOOK YEARS TO
come to terms with
The White Lie,
and during that time I lived my own version of deceit. I maintained my good-Adventist behaviors—wearing no jewelry except my wedding band, keeping the Sabbath faithfully, paying my tithe on time and to the penny, drinking no caffeine—but inside I became a seething,
questioning skeptic. The more I came to the painful but inevitable realizations, the more I knew this double life could not be maintained, that at some point something would have to give. I dreaded that impending moment. My entire life had been dedicated to the Adventist church; my job depended on it and my whole family revolved around it. There was so much to lose.

Lee was having his own crisis during this time, also questioning his rigid beliefs, but we each respected that we had to make our own decisions. Short of walking away from the church, I looked at several options for myself. I could stay and pretend I still believed in Ellen White. Or I could ignore the lie the church had been founded on and focus only on Jesus—at least I still believed in that part. In a desperate attempt to work out my dissonance I attended several meetings with Pastor Desmond Ford, a brilliant defrocked SDA minister from Australia who challenged the Adventist emphasis on works rather than on righteousness by faith. His teachings made sense. Could I stay—but with some reformed understanding of my faith?

In that vein, Lee and I had joined a more liberal SDA church where we had many friends. But the end for me was at hand, partly precipitated by grief. Three horrific events brought my faith to its proverbial knees.

First, a drunk driver hit our friend’s car as she was driving her children to school. Her eight-year-old daughter sustained a severe spinal injury and was left in a coma. Next, a newly married couple from our Sabbath School class was camping in Yosemite when a fellow camper picked a fight and slugged the man in the chest. Due to a genetic anomaly, our young parishioner became instantly paralyzed on impact. Then another young member was implicated in a drug deal and faced imprisonment.

These tragedies happened in quick succession. Everyone in our congregation fasted and prayed fervently for positive outcomes, but in each case our prayers were not answered: the little girl died, the groom never walked again, and the young man went to jail.

I was devastated. I’d been taught to believe in miracles. Even though I was coming to terms with the falseness of my prophet, I still longed to have faith in a loving God who listened to prayers and doled out real justice.

As our community grappled with grief, our liberal Sabbath School class uncharacteristically decided to study a non-SDA book written by a Jewish rabbi,
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
, trying to reconcile what we wanted to be true about God with the unfairness of these three terrible situations. Some in our congregation reasoned that since God knows the end from the beginning, He knows the best time when someone should die. Since we didn’t know what would have happened in the life of the little child who died, for example, maybe God took her while she was still saved. Maybe later she would have left the church or done something to bar her from heaven.

This and similar arguments were supposed to give comfort, but I couldn’t buy in. I found myself coming away from every Sabbath School discussion thinking that God was acting more like a dead-beat dad than a loving Father who watches out for us.

The final straw came near the end of fall quarter. Dr. Hopp, the dean of our school, came into my office and cheerfully told me she had an anecdote to share. She had never chatted with me before, so I welcomed her and listened intently as she launched into a story about a former master’s student.

“Remember, in graduate school, the South African minister in class with you?” she started.

I nodded. I remembered Hugh. I’d liked him.

“You realize he didn’t graduate, don’t you? Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“Back then Dr. Mervyn Hardinge [the dean of Public Health] came to me and said he’d received a tip that Hugh, who was married and was doing his field work in Arizona, was carrying on with one of the other students. The dean planned to ask a friend of his to visit the campground where Hugh was staying and befriend him. This way the dean could find out what was going on. The dean’s friend reported back that he’d met Hugh and the student he was allegedly having the affair with, and that he had in fact seen the woman at Hugh’s campsite the next morning.”